Down in the Dumps

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Dumps and junkyards are, just like abandoned warehouses, a common setting for fights, club houses, secret meetings, and the various other fantastic situations fictional characters get themselves into. There's something about dumps— everything there is dirty, old, worn out, broken. Symbolically, it's a place of decay; pragmatically, there's lots of junk to play with, and it can be broken or blown up without having to worry about property damage.

Expect towering columns of crushed cars and neat piles of assorted garbage, perfect for hiding behind; a giant magnet or claw that can be easily operated by someone without training; a Conveyor Belt o' Doom leading into a crushing machine or incinerator; at least one junkyard dog; plenty of Trash Talk; and brown.

Robin: Tim faces off against Scott Lowe, also known as "Junkyard Dog", in a junkyard after the villain controls a bunch of dogs to try and kill Robin. Tim is exceptionally pissed at Lowe because all the dogs Lowe turned into killers via mind control are going to be put down.

Films — Animation

In All Dogs Go to Heaven, after Charlie and Itchy rescue Anne-Marie from Carface, they take shelter in a junkyard.

The climax of The Brave Little Toaster is in a dump, with a giant magnet chasing the heroes around and tossing them into the Conveyor Belt o' Doom. Particularly depressing since all the cars being discarded are sentient and singing about their glory days before their owners abandoned them as "worthless", while on a conveyor belt leading them into a machine that is going to crush and kill them.

Toy Story 3: After trying to avoid it the whole movie, the heroes wind up in the dump, and nearly die in the Conveyor Belt o' Doom. Luckily, there's a claw machine.

The first half of WALLE is set in a giant dump, a.k.a. the planet Earth.

One of the characters in The Iron Giant lives in a scrap metal yard; he's a modern artist who uses the trash to make sculptures. It's also a useful place to hide (and feed) the eponymous giant.

Earth, in the 2009 Astro Boy film, has become a sort of Landfill Beyond the Stars to the residents of Cloud City, who have since forgotten that they left quite a few people behind.

Wreck-It Ralph lives in the dump. His game's backstory says his home in the forest was demolished for a pretty apartment building... that he isn't allowed to live in. Ralph is more depressed over the loneliness of his situation than the actual living conditions.

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Films — Live-Action

Dog Bite Dog: Much of the film's scenes is set in a massive landfill in downtown Hong Kong. It is over here where the protagonist meets his new girlfriend, and later wife, a Cambodian immigrant who had to eke out a living in the wastes.

Star Wars - Leia, Luke, Han Solo and Chewbacca drop down a garbage chute into the disposal to avoid being trapped by stormtroopers. Now they're trapped in the garbage with a monster and walls that close in on themselves.

In The Phantom Menace, Watto's junkyard on Tatooine is pivotal to the plot as it is where Qui-Gon goes to find a replacement part for the disabled starship and this leads him and Padme to meet Anakin, who works there.

The planet Jakku in The Force Awakens is essentially a giant junkyard, littered with the wreckage of downed ships and vehicles from the last great battle between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance. Rey lives inside a wrecked Imperial AT-AT and spends her days scavenging for parts she can sell.

Corvette Summer (1978) starts in an auto junkyard, as a group of high school kids look for a car to fix up as their auto shop project for the year.

Pretty much all of Richard Lester's post-apocalyptic black comedy The Bed-Sitting Room is filmed in real-life junk pile locations.

In A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Freddy Krueger's body was hidden in the trunk of an old car at the dump after the parents of Elm Street burned him alive, and to defeat Krueger his body has to be recovered from the dump and given a proper burial. The same dump appears as a setting in the fourth movie, when Freddy reawakens.

In Labyrinth, Sarah wakes up from her dream with the enchanted peach to find herself in a junkyard, with the Junk Lady showing her a facsimile of her own bedroom that's buried under a pile of junk.

In Mario (1984), the kids collect metal from a scrapyard to build their fortress.

The Hoodlum starts and ends in the city landfill, with the scenes in-between telling us How We Got Here. This landfill is the one that the Lubeck's first apartment overlooked, the one that Vincent grew up seeing and smelling, and the one that he has spent his entire life running away from. And that Vincent's rottenness has cost his brother Johnny everything he loved, Johnny has brought Vince here to kill him: so he can die in the garbage like he deserves. Ultimately Johnny cant bring himself to do it; Lt. Burdick, however, has been trailing them, and has no such compunctions. Vince is shot to death in the dump as he attempts to flee, and dies in a heap of garbage, old tires, and industrial refuse.

Literature

The Barrens in IT, the place where all the kids go to do just about anything.

The main setting of the 1960s children's novel and later 1980s TV series Stig of the Dump.

Billy ends up in one in Ollie's Odyssey where he finds a whole bunch of thrown out objects who just sit around reminiscing about when they were useful. Billy raises their spirits and makes them a resrue team to help him save Ollie.

The very first episode of Doctor Who, "An Unearthly Child" has the TARDIS located in a junkyard. Much later and much, much farther away, the episode "The Doctor's Wife" also took place in a junk yard.

Bobby Singer, one of the main characters on Supernatural runs a junk yard as a day job. His house is also located on the junk yard grounds. Several scenes have included using random rusted cars and parts to dispatch ghosts, leviathans, etc.

In Breaking Bad, Heisenberg arranges for his first major drug deal to go down in a junkyard.

Tuco: What, was the mall closed?

Seasons 7 and 8 of The Walking Dead include a group of survivors called the Scavengers who make their home in a junkyard.

In the 1979 serialisation of the final Quatermass story, a badly injured Professor Quatermass, stumbling through the streets of a London in the late stages of urban collapse, is saved by a community of elderly people hiding out in an ingenious labyrinth made out of old vehicles in a scrapyard.

Here Come the Double Deckers, a 17-part British children's TV series from 197071, revolved around the adventures of seven children who had made a den in an old double-decker London bus in a disused junk yard.

The Good Doctor: After Shaun and Steve run away from home, they live in an abandoned bus in a junkyard.

Music

The Gorillaz' current studio, Plastic Beach, is essentially a giant floating landfill.

It gets sort of horrific when you realize that it's based on a real location. Though the "real" version is only noticeable through sampling; the average density is around 4 (usually microscopic) particles per square meter, so it's not like you can get out of a boat and walk around on it or anything.

Their old home base, Kong Studios, was surrounded by a dump as well. The song "We Are Happy Landfill" is about it.

The cover of Joe Walsh's album, There Goes The Neighborhood, has Joe driving a tank in a junkyard. The video for the song, "Life Of Illusion", takes place at the photo shoot for it.

The Mark Knopfler song So Far From The Clyde is about a British ship that's being decommissioned in a scrap yard in India. The titular Clyde refers to the Clyde Shipping Company's shipyard in Glasgow, Scotland, where the ship had been constructed.

The video for Peter Schilling's "Major Tom (Coming Home)" takes place in a junkyard, with Peter and his band sitting within a stack of old abandoned cars.

Part of Huey Lewis and the News' "Perfect World" video takes place in a junkyard, probably to underscore what the lyrics are saying "there's no living in a perfect world; there ain't no perfect world anyway."

Call of Cthulhu: The supplement Cthulhu Now includes the adventure "The Killer Out of Space", where an auto junkyard is of prime importance: it has giant electromagnets that can be used to trap the main opponent, a Colour Out of Space.

Theatre

In the 2013 musical Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie and his family live near a dump, and both he and his father frequently stop there to scrounge for potentially useful items. The setting symbolizes not only decay and waste, but also possibility for those with a creative bent.

Awesome Possum... Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt has "Dr. Machino's Domain" and "The Fortress of Garbage", landfills complete with the additional dark skies, menacing mechas and jefferies tubes, which serve as the last two worlds in the game.

Bendy in Nightmare Run episode "Bendy in Soup Gone Bad" occurs in the dumps - and the boss is an empty, sentient soup can.

The New Haven area in Borderlands is right next to a gigantic landfill, that actually takes up two thirds of the whole map.

Breath of Fire III has Junk Town, a coastal town that collects and repairs scrap machinery parts washed ashore.

The Level "The Enemy Of My Enemy" from Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 2 is set in U.S. Vehicle Disposal Yard 437 Aka "The Boneyard", a dump for old military vehicles. The Special Ops mission "Snatch and Grab" and the multiplayer levels "Scrapyard" and "Trailer Park" are set in the same location while the map "Salvage" is based on a different snow-covered junk yard.

Blighttown in Dark Souls, a ramshackle, vertical collection of platforms and ladders that stretches from the Undead Burg Sewers to a poisonous swamp.

Taito's arena shooter Dead Connection has its second stage set in a junkyard, with heaps of junked cars and stacks of discarded tires.

The Division has an interesting take on this. The game is set entirely in Midtown Manhattan; with land averaging more than $100 per square foot, it's no surprise that there are no working garbage dumps in this area. However, the setting is the near future, weeks or months after super-smallpox has caused the breakdown of order and all municipal services. There is garbage everywhere. Some areas, above-ground and below, have trash bags stacked twice as high as the player, for yards in all directions. This is completely realistic, of course. Even under normal conditions, Manhattan sidewalks are routinely compromised on garbage day. With New Yorkers producing thousands of tons of trash per day, and all of it meant to leave the island (which in this case is quarantined), a serious interruption of waste collection would look exactly like that, and fast. It's even more believable when you find out what the sanitation workers have been doing instead...

Gordon Freeman gets caught in a Star Wars-esque trash compactor in Half-Life, as does Adrian Shepard in Opposing Force

New Junk City, the first level of the first Earthworm Jim game, is a giant junk heap complete with guard dogs and a construction worker boss.

Epic Mickey has Mickey Mouse traversing Mickeyjunk Mountain, which is a huge heap of old Mickey Mouse merchandise. Oh, the irony...

While you could argue that the wastes of Fallout are one huge junkyard, Fallout 4 is the first game in the series that has locations that are explicitly junkyards such as the Rotten Landfill and the Massachusetts Fusion Disposal sites.

The third level of Redneck Rampage is a gigantic junkyard. Attractions include the tender's shack, the car crusher, and lots upon lots of gaps between piles of cars leading to secret areas.

The Secret World has Edgar's Scrapyard in Kingsmouth, which contains hundreds of wrecked cars, aggressive junk-golems, and at least one corpse stuffed in a car's trunk.

Shadows of the Empire has the Ord Mantell Junkyard, a massive junkyard the size of an entire city filled with trash and junk as far as the eye can see. If you pay attention you will see stuff like an AT-AT, the Sandcrawler, X-Wings and TIE fighters.

The fourth area, Delphinus, in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, is modeled after a massive junkyard. It represents mankind's wasteful nature, and is ruled over by the Tyrant Asura, a Social Darwinist who is convinced that the only way mankind can survive is to abandon all civilized impulses. To that end, the instant the investigative team sets foot in Delphinus, they get hit with a Hate Plague...

The Garbage in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., a place full of enormous garbage heaps from the time the Chernobyl reactor had a meltdown. There's much to be scavenged in it, from weapons and ammunition to valuable artifacts and even food. Whether the piles are radioactive or not seems to depend on the Zone's "mood" between emissionsnote they are horribly radioactive in Shadow of Chernobyl, but not in Clear Sky.

In the Tiny Toon AdventuresLicensed Game for the NES, the second act of the fourth world takes place in a junkyard. Enemies include cats that throw tin cans, and Rhubella Rat, who jumps from behind the fence. There are also barrels in that hurt you if you stand on them.

The fifth trial in Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc ends with Naegi escaping his execution thanks to Alter Ego infecting the school's computer system, where he gets thrown into the school's trash dump instead of being squashed to death by a trash compactor. Eventually, Kirigiri makes her way down disguised as a garbage bag to rescue him.

Fat Albert and his gang hang out at the dump, and even play music using junk-based instruments.note Rudy, whose family is considered relatively wealthy, has an actual (monogrammed) electric guitar but still hangs out at the clubhouse in the dump.

Also the base of the SWAT Kats- though not by choice, they were previously Enforcers, but got shunted here after an incident- see their page for more details. But they managed to take advantage of this to build and keep hidden all their crime-fighting equipment (yes, including their fighter jet).

In Hulk Hogan's Rock 'N' Wrestling, the Junkyard Dog lives in a junkyard.

Mickey's Trailer opens with Mickey Mouse stepping out of his travel trailer, greeting a new morning in a pastoral glen - he pulls a lever and the picket fence spools in, the carpet of lush grass rolls up, and the entire backdrop accordions up like a folding fan, revealing the town dump he's camping at.

Chuck Jones' No Barking opens with a sunrise (music: the peaceful part of the "William Tell Overture") in what looks like a sylvan garden in silhouette with an ornate gate - which, as the light grows, turns out to be a bed frame in the city dump, where Claude Cat peacefully dozes.

Megas XLR, the character Goat owns a junkyard. It is there that Coop found Megas, and he and Jamie visit it frequently. Also, in the episode "Junk in the Trunk", they visit a junkyard in space to find new parts for Megas.

The go-to location for both the Mondo TV and webseries of The Trash Pack is Trash Town, a large dump. While the Mondo TV series is surprisingly organized (with robotic sorters that put waste in each respective category), the webseries version is gross and sloppy, just like the original aspect of the toyline.

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